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Talk:Yael Baron/@comment-25147000-20170708132449/@comment-4249436-20170710145614
Your entire comment reads like one of those ~le edgy~ tumblr posts that would be written by someone with a username "anti-feminism-pro-toenails" or something else equally embarrassing. Do you run a "anime characters for real justice" mod blog and use the phrase "r u triggered u essjaydubya" by any chance? Firstly, your perception of Yael's character is totally off. Yael has always been annoying and sanctimonious (imo, people may disagree and that's fine, I just always was annoyed by Yael ever since they bullied Maya but still acted all holier than thou afterwards lol) since the minute they showed up on this show, they didn't become any more "SJW-y" since coming out as genderqueer. Vijay and Baaz were far more persistent in getting Hunter to use Yael's preferred pronouns than Yael was. Yael was much more passive about it than the other two were. With the whole shaving crap and the bra storyline, Yael was doing it for themselves, they weren't lording their decisions over other people or expecting girls to feel the same about their bodies. Yael was doing it for themselves, and simply asked for others not to judge them. Nothing wrong with anyone doing that, real or fictional. Yael's always been pretty sexist imo, but just because you and I both dislike Yael as a character, there's no need to be disrespectful to actual, real life NB people who may be coming to this page to learn more about the NB character on the show. Secondly, I will admit. The first time I heard about NB genders and the like, I was confused as hell. I'm in my late 20s. My high school days were ages ago, and back in mid-2000s, we barely knew about being trans, let alone anything else. I grew up believing that you were either male or female. That's it, and that's just how the world was. So I remember thinking "how is that possible? How can you be both, or none at all?" and racking my brain trying to figure out how anyone could identify as non binary. But then I stopped and realized that it doesn't matter how it works. What matters is that it's how someone chooses to identify themselves. It's how someone, another human being, feels about themselves. It's not my place to tell them they're wrong. It's not my place to judge. What I can do is try to understand more, and I was excited that a show that has helped so many young people feel more comfortable with themselves was going to tackle this complex and personal topic. You also seem to be confusing gender dysphoria with body dysmorphia. It is exceedingly rare for a cisgender person to struggle with their gender identity the way that a trans kid would, or a genderqueer/NB kid would. They're similar in the sense that it involves being uncomfortable in your own skin, but also very, very different conditions. You're thinking of body dysmorphia to a T, something that the majority of adolescents will deal with at some point in time. Since you seem to be confused, body dysmorphia is feeling uncomfortable with your body in the sense that you feel you're too fat or too thin, that your breasts are too big or too small or uneven or "shaped weird." If you are insecure about the size of your penis or the shape of your penis. If you're insecure about how quickly or how slowly you grow body hair. If you don't like your nose, your feet, your hands, your ankles, the list goes on and on. Pretty much any insecurity that will cause anxiety or depression is body dysmorphia. Meanwhile, gender dysphoria is rather rare, only a small percentage of people go through it and you can only go through it if you feel a disconnect between your biological sex and your personal gender identity. It involves disgust at your body (for instance, someone who is born male but doesn't feel like a man will feel disgust at their penis. Someone who is born male but is comfortable with being a man will not feel disgust at the fact that they have a penis, though they may feel insecure or anxious about how big or how small their penis is, or how it looks) but it also involves a vast amount of psychological and physiological effects that are simply... not present in individuals who suffer from body dysmorphia. Thirdly, while I definitely think Degrassi could have handled the plot better and it came across a bit like "if you don't like farts or shaving, you may be genderqueer," I am blaming that on the fact that there simply are not enough episodes in the season to properly handle the story. When there were longer seasons and more 2-part episodes, it would have worked out much better. Because you're right, you don't have to like makeup to be a girl, and you don't have to like farts to be a boy. But just because this particular writing was a shining example of why Degrassi needs more episodes in a season (and perhaps a bunch of consultants who actually are genderqueer to help with these sorts of episodes), doesn't mean that being genderqueer is fictitious. It's not a problem with the theme, it's a problem with how rushed the story was. You need to differentiate between the issue being dealt with and how ''it's being presented. But you seem to have made up your mind about genderqueer identities even before watching #FactsOnly. I touched on this earlier, but just because ''Yael has said some pretty sexist stuff (again, my opinion... sorry Yael fans who might be reading this! I just never liked Yael lol, they always irritated me haha) during their tenure on the show doesn't make all genderqueer individuals sexist nor does it make the identity as a whole a sexist one. You're right. Not fitting the stereotypes generally assigned to your gender does not make you genderqueer. But the difference between people like say, myself, who don't perfectly fit the mold of a stereotypical woman, and a genderqueer person is that while I enjoyed "masculine" things growing up and still do to this day, I never once questioned that I was a woman. I never felt uncomfortable with my body parts the way someone suffering from gender dysphoria would. ''That's ''how you know you're non-binary or genderqueer or trans or anything other than cisgender. Gender dysphoria. The acknowledgement of non-binary doesn't change anything about that, and you really need to unclutch the pearls and stop being afraid that people are gonna think you're genderqueer or something because you are insecure with the fact that you don't fit the model of "the ultimate dude." Nobody here but you thinks that not fitting a stereotype means you're "a brand new gender." I think it's fantastic that a form of mainstream media has a NB character. I am still admittedly confused about genderqueer identities, and I am looking forward to learning more to better understand how people different than me feel about themselves by watching Yael and their journey. Perhaps you should stick to watching your little cartoons and playing your little vidya games and leave the grown up topics to the grownups. Sounds like a good idea to me. /rant